Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A morbid irony, Jan realized, but slaughter had given her a life. Napalm had made her happy. She hoped the war would never end.”
― Tim O'Brien, July, July

“Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them—a watched feeling—and a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried / In The Lake Of The Woods

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Gunfire,” declared an enthusiastic Senate staffer, “is the dance music of American liberty.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don't. Yet when I received Normal Bowker's letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“But the lieutenant knew that in war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose. Death was its own purpose, no qualification or restraint. He did not celebrate war. He did not believe in glory.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Ölebilecek adamların bütün duygusal yükünü taşırlardı. Elem, dehşet, sevgi, özlem - soyut şeylerdi bunlar, fakat soyut şeylerin de somut bir ağırlığı vardı. Utanç verici anılar taşırlardı. Zor zapt edilen korkaklıkların ortak sırrını taşırlardı, kaçma veya donup kalma ya da gizlenme içgüdüsü ve pek çok açıdan yüklerin en ağırıydı bu, çünkü hiçbir zaman sırtından indiremezdin, mükemmel bir denge ve duruş gerektirirdi. Onurlarını taşırlardı. Bir askerin en büyük utancını taşırlardı, yüz kızarıklığını. Öldürür ve ölürlerdi, çünkü bunu yapmasalar utanırlardı. Savaşta bu yüzden vardılar zaten, olumlu hiçbir şey yoktu, ne düş, ne görkem ne de onur; onursuzluğun yüz kızarıklığı olmasın yeter ki. Utançtan ölmemek için ölürlerdi. Sürünerek tünellere girer, ateş altında ilerlemeye devam ederlerdi. Her sabah, bütün belirsizliğe rağmen, bacaklarını harekete zorlarlardı. Dayanırlardı. Sırtlamayı sürdürürlerdi. O aşikar seçeneğe teslim olmazlar, gözlerini kapatıp yere düşmezlerdi. O kadar kolaydı, gerçekten. Kendini yere bırak, kaslarının gevşemesine izin ver, konuşma ve kankaların seni, yerden kalkıp havalandıktan sonra burnunu indirip ileri atılarak uzağa, dünyaya götürecek helikoptere yükleyinceye kadar hiç kımıldama. Kendini yere atmaya bakardı, ama kimse yere atmazdı kendini. Cesaret değildi tam olarak; amaç kahramanlık değildi. Korkak olamayacak kadar korkmalarıydı nedeni daha çok.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“We find truth inside, or not at all.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Upstairs, I mean. It takes brains. You have to explain some hard stuff, like why people die, or why God invented pneumonia and all that.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. 'What's everybody so upset about?' Azar said. 'I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The thing about a story is that you dream as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to move the spirits in the head.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In a way, maybe, I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d finally worked my way out. A hot afternoon, a bright August sun, and the war was over.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“We'll find new stuff to want.”
― Tim O'Brien

“They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture”
― Tim O'Brien

“It is important to be faithful to your values and to your opinions, but remember that your opinions are opinions. And remember that your values may reorganize themselves over time.”
― Tim O'Brien, Dad's Maybe Book

“I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, 'All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“We all need our fantasies, Angie. Even you. Harps and halos. Life everlasting. UFOs and laced Kool-Aid and Prince Charming zooming us off to paradise. Everybody on earth—we trade in reality for whatever keeps us going.” “You’re defending deceit?” “No, I’m describing it.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“My job title, I believe, was Declotter.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A few months back, Meredith and I took our sons to an evening of modern dance. It was an outdoor performance, in a horse paddock on a ranch in central Texas, and the dance involved nine young women and a very large horse. There was a great deal of spinning in the dirt. There was swift running, much kicking, many horse-like movements of the head and shoulders. It was strange and very beautiful. At one point, midway through the performance, Meredith leaned over to Timmy and asked if he understood what the dancing was all about. Timmy said no. Meredith said, “Well, right now, for instance, that dancer over there, she’s like a baby horse—a foal—trying to stand up for the first time. Can you see that?” Timmy nodded. He looked puzzled. “Well, yes,” he said, “but what about all the other shenanigans?”
― Tim O'Brien, Dad's Maybe Book

“I feared ridicule and censure.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The fabulous and the fantastic—the wildly outlandish lies—were typically questioned by the intellect yet wholly absorbed by the heart. Almost always, mythomaniacs lied to reinforce fragile egos, decorating their lives with unearned grandeur.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“Stories are for joining the past and the future. Stories are for those late hours of the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when
there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs.”
― Tim O'Brien

“His brain had the bends.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato